Relaxing evening

Tootie and I both had a relaxing evening; we even shared my favorite chair.

It's been a nice evening.  My early evening college class that I teach was enjoyable with a lot of good conversation.  It's a composition class, and we're studying division and classification.  As part of the unit, we read the essay "English 99: Literacy Among the Ruins" written by Frank Gannon, a humorist and essayist.  The article was about a remedial college class that he taught which he said was made up of three groups: jocks, bored girls, and Bosnian refugees.  In it, he talked about the disillusionment he faced with the class.  He wanted to discover some great writer, but he was saddled with this class.  The bored girls talked about boyfriends, oversleeping, and missing classes -- insignificant stuff.  The jocks wrote about partying and all the great things they did in sports.  Meanwhile the refugees wrote about surviving when friends and family were being killed all around them.  As an instructor, Gannon would circle a verb and mark "agreement" and then feel stupid about it.  It seemed a bit ridiculous to be correcting the grammar of papers which dealt with life and death issues.  We got into a lively discussion on several things, including the topic of whether remedial college classes were a bit shady or not.  They're required in some cases, so a college will get money for them regardless if the student flunks out or not.  They don't even count for college credit.  As an instructor myself, I see the need for remedial classes even in college, but I wonder if they work.

I finally had some time to think about my Dean Knight novel, and I wrote a preliminary summary of it.  I need to flesh it out, but I can tell you it was a relief to come up with an idea that I think is workable: interesting enough with both drama and comedy, but yet, focused enough that I'm not trying to do too much.  My next step will be to submit it to my writing class for approval, and then, I can finally start writing on it again.

It got up into the 50's today and we had a lot of sunshine.  Not a bad day at all.